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Hard to believe that three months ago today I got a wild hair and clicked on the “Create Your Own Time Sink” button.
Thank you to everyone who reads this blog. I’ve gotten to meet a lot of good people, and I’ve learned a lot, mostly about how much I have to learn.
Summer is the time of the year I like most. Many people say “I can always put on more coats in the winter.” Not me, I can never get warm enough. I prefer to feel the sweat roll down my . . . neck. I like it hot.
Summer is the height of competition season, and on this Solstice I’m struck by how little I have competed so far this year. I have two favorite USPSA clubs here in the Atlanta area that I shoot at, one the second Saturday, and one the third Sunday, and I’ve had other family commitments so far this summer. I’ve shot two Steel matches, at that’s it. Yes, I spent Memorial Day at the LuckyGunner Blogger Shoot, but that doesn’t count.
In July, I have a Steel match, a USPSA match, and a GSSF match in successive weekends. Then, Gaston Glock’s birthday on the 19th. It should be a good month.
So, okay already. Stop my bitchin’. Load some magazines, get my practice in, and hit the road. I have no one to blame but me.
This weekend my wife and I had a few more discussions about family safety and preparedness. It started with another robbery in the news, where some people were mugged, and despite giving the robbers what they wanted, were shot and killed. Our take was that there was really no excuse for two people together to be surprised by a robber, if they were paying attention to their surroundings. That got us to talking about awareness.
There are a lot of ways to describe our levels of awareness, and maybe the best was put forth by Lt. Colonel Jeff Cooper in his book Principles of Personal Defense. My wife is not a reader of the good Lt. Colonel Cooper, so I talked a little about his color code. For those who might have missed this or forgotten, Cooper summarized those this way:
White – Unaware and unprepared.
Yellow – Relaxed but alert of your surroundings, and prepared to defend yourself if necessary. You see people and things coming in and out of your area, and you assess them for threat, almost subconsciously.
Orange – Something is not quite right and has your attention. It may be time to take furtive evasive action or other action.
Red – In an active fight. It’s time to either get away, or defend yourself if needed.
She seemed to really take to our discussion, so we talked about how we can work as a team when we’re out, watching out for each other. She immediately noted that we would be in Yellow all the time, but if one of us sensed something, we needed to be able to tell the other without alerting the threat. After some talk, we decided our code for that would be to pointedly use the word “orange,” as in “I feel orange right now, three o’clock.”
We’d had the Condition Red talk before, without using that phrase, and she has always known that if I ever had to draw my gun, it would not be to threaten, it would be because, as Tom Givens put it, there was somebody there who needed to be shot. That would be her cue to move with the kids as fast as she could away from me and away from the threat, since I then became the number one target for whoever we were confronting.
Later, we went out for a little shopping, and we talked about this again in the car. The telling time happened when we stopped to use an ATM in a part of town we don’t normally frequent. As we pulled up I talked about what I was going to do, and she agreed to watch out for anyone approaching the car.
My ATM routine is simple. Pull up as close to the ATM as I can so I don’t have to open the door. Keep the doors locked. Keep the car in gear. Don’t keep my arm hanging out of the car while I wait. As money, card, and receipt come out of the car, I shuffle them into my other hand and into the car. As soon as the ATM is done, I pull away, and I put the money and card away when I stop later.
We finished our shopping and got home with no incidents.
Now, I admit, we used to go our way in condition white, or as we also call it, Fat, Dumb, and Happy. So, did our awareness spoil the time together? Not at all. In fact, we probably felt better because we knew we were watching out for each other, even more than before.
It was a yellow day.
I was thinking about the training session I had a few weeks back at the LuckyGunner Blogger Shoot, and how the trainers told me I had my magazines in my magazine pouch backward. The idea was that the magazine should be in the pouch with the bullets facing forward, so as you draw a new magazine from the pouch, you can place your index finger on the tip of the bullet and index it into the magazine well.
The problem is, when I first started shooting 19 years ago, I guessed wrong. I had no instruction, and I had a 50 / 50 chance in orientation of the bullets in my mag pouch. I don’t remember thinking about it at all, but I know I started facing them backward.
I became aware of this “error” some time ago, and I even tried turning all my mag pouches around, and trying to teach myself to to it the other way. It was hard, because to me I seemed to be working against normal physiology. My way, I just pivot my wrist to orient the bullets forward. The other way, I have to twist my wrist, which seems to be a more awkward movement.
Any way, I worked on it off and on for about a month, before I gave up and went back.
So at the training class I just said “20 years of muscle memory, sorry,” and kept them like they were.
Modern behavioral science tells us that it takes about 1,000 repetitions of anything to ingrain it as muscle memory*. In the mean time, when I tried to do it full speed, I messed it up.
I am willing to put in the training it takes, provided I know there is a solid reason.
So I ask, is there a real, verifiable reason for one orientation over another**? If so, I will work through the pain and change. If not, I’m going to stay the way I am.
Thank you in advance. I await your responses.
* I tried to find a first source for this assertion. Most of the sources I found just stated it as known fact.
** “Real, verifiable reasons” do not include “because that’s the way they teach it at Gunsite” or “because that’s the way Dave Sevigny does it.” I need scientific proof, not hearsay or legend.
Fill Yer Hands 